


After the Fall

by madeleinefs



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Depression, John Watson - Freeform, John is a Bit Not Good, Other, Overdose, POV John Watson, PTSD, Post Reichenbach, Reichenbach Fall, Sherlock Holmes - Freeform, Suicide, Tragedy, unhealthy coping methods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 07:42:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11824167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madeleinefs/pseuds/madeleinefs
Summary: Angsty one-shot of John's reaction to the death of his best friend.





	After the Fall

**Author's Note:**

> _Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale._
> 
>  
> 
> **Peter S. Beale**

"Hello?" Dread rooted in the pit of John's stomach as he answered the phone. He hopped out of the black cab and jogged around it. He didn't know where he was headed, only that he was going to find Sherlock, and then they would be okay.

"John."

"Hey, Sherlock, are you okay?" His heart beating in his stomach, in his throat. Something was off. The London sky was dreary and bleak, as it always was, but today there was a coldness in the air unrelated to the weather. The stillness was foreboding, and John was…

Not scared, surely, John didn't get scared. Sherlock was fine, he always was fine. He waited for an answer.

"Turn around and walk back the way you came."

"No, I'm coming in-" John argued. He always came to Sherlock.

"Just do as I ask! Please," Sherlock's voice wavered. He never said please, John thought. He never said please-

John turned around and reluctantly headed back toward where he had been dropped off. "Where?"

"Stop there," Sherlock's voice commanded in John's ear.

"Sherlock," John faltered.

"Okay look up, I'm on the rooftop."

"Oh, god," he murmured, turning around. Sherlock was a dark silhouette against the pale sky, his coat waving against the still body in the wind, as though some sort of cloak behind a superhero about to fall to flight.

"I-I can't come down, so we'll just have to do it like this."

"What's going on?" John's breath quickened, and he found himself almost unable to breathe.

"An apology. It's all true." A pause. "Everything they said about me. I invented Moriarty."

John rocked himself in a corner of the apartment. Sherlock's violin was leaning against the wall, and every so often John would reach out and touch it, as if to affirm that it was real, that Sherlock had been real, was real, and any second he could come in through that door and pick up the instrument and gently pluck its strings-

Another flashback drove itself through his mind abruptly, down his spine-the blood, so much blood, all the soldiers, and Sherlock in the middle somehow, stop! Stop stop stop, he doesn't belong there, he is alive, he'll always be alive somewhere, oh god the bl ood the f u ckin ke i sherlock please

He was a soldier. An army doctor. He had seen more dead men than he cared to remember; dismembered bodies, bloodied and battered corpses, faces of friends with eyes staring unblinking and unseeing at John. Close the eyelids with a swift soft motion, he'd done this before; he'll do this again. The cries and the yells and the stench of rotting flesh and death. And he would do it all over again, see war tenfold, relive the fear and the anxiety and the sadness forever, if it meant that Sherlock was not part of the carnage of life.

The sleeping pills were not working. Temazepam, Triazolam, Zaleplon, Zaleplon, nothing worked. And then they put him on Benzodiazepines to try and calm his flashbacks and episodes and god, he initially had been ashamed of the pile of shit his life had become, but now? Now he didn't even give a fuck. He had no friends, nothing to show for himself except a blog with no new entries and an apartment full of hidden drugs and illegal specimens and a phone book full of names of dead men he had known in a past life it seemed.

It wasn't until Mycroft found John unconscious in a pile of his own vomit, and subsequently was rushed to the ER where his stomach was pumped empty of a bottle of vodka, shots of absinthe, and an estimated two whole bottles of antipsychotics that John realized something needed to change. Sherlock was dead. It had been 4 months. This wasn't a magic trick. He wasn't a superhero. He was dead. And John needed to get over it.

And so he did.


End file.
